This Year’s Cooler iPhone 17 Pro May Run Longer and Brighter
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We’re less than a week away from Apple’s big “Awe Dropping” fall event, where the company is widely expected to unveil this year’s iPhone 17 lineup. However, that doesn’t mean there still isn’t time for a few more eleventh-hour leaks and rumors to hint at what the new models will have in store for us.
Such is the case with a new report from Chinese supply chain leaker “Instant Digital” (aka Setsuna Digital). In a Weibo post, the leaker tacitly confirms numerous reports that the iPhone 17 Pro models will get improved cooling, but adds that this will serve a practical purpose beyond reducing heat during demanding tasks like gaming.
It’s a given that gamers will benefit from a cooler iPhone. After all, that’s one of the tentpole features of gaming-focused smartphones like Asus’ ROG Phone Pro lineup, which was not only one of the first to adopt the vapor chamber cooling that’s reportedly coming to this year’s iPhone 17 Pro models, but also offered an optional AeroActive Cooler accessory to keep things even more chill.
While the iPhone 15 Pro introduced support for AAA console games on the iPhone, anyone who has tried to play Assassin’s Creed Mirage or Resident Evil Village on an iPhone for an extended run has undoubtedly had a few moments where they wondered whether their titanium frame was about to melt.
Still, there’s more to providing efficient cooling than uncomfortable fingers. When excessive heat is generated, performance has to be throttled to keep things from getting out of hand. As Instant Digital notes, the cooling will deliver a more stable frame rate when playing large games, with fewer frame drops or lags.
This will also extend to shooting video at higher resolutions and frame rates, such as 4K at 60 fps, which could often be problematic on hot and sunny summer days.
However, the most widespread practical benefit of the new cooling technology will be increased brightness on hot, sunny days, as well as longer battery life for the iPhone 17 Pro models.
While Apple has been offering 2,000 nits of outdoor brightness since the iPhone 14 Pro series, it’s something that many folks in warmer summer climates are rarely able to take advantage of. If you’ve used a recent iPhone Pro model outdoors on a hot day, you’ve probably noticed the screen often dimming back down to levels that are barely readable in direct sunlight. That’s Apple’s thermal throttling at work, since a bright screen generates a lot of heat.
The rumoured vapor chamber cooling could help to address this by dissipating that additional heat away from the screen, allowing it to run at maximum brightness for longer. This doesn’t mean Apple wouldn’t still have thermal throttling in place, but the improved cooling would mean the screen wouldn’t reach that threshold as quickly, and might not even do so at all except on the very hottest days.
Along the same lines, improved cooling would naturally result in both longer battery life and better battery health. As we’ve discussed before, heat is extremely hard on batteries. This is a universal problem based on how the chemistry of lithium-ion technology works, so the cooler they run, the longer they’ll last.
All of these things mentioned by Instant Digital aren’t exactly revelations. These are standard benefits of improved thermals, and it’s likely Apple wouldn’t even need to make any specific tweaks; lower temperatures inside the iPhone automatically result in better performance, so the only thing Apple needs to do is keep it cool. If the rumors of vapor chamber cooling for this year’s iPhone 17 Pro models turn out to be accurate, we’ll likely see performance boosts that go well beyond the sum of the differences between the A19 Pro chip and its predecessors.
The catch here is that this is still likely to be exclusive to the iPhone 17 Pro models. If you’re planning on picking up an iPhone 17 or the rumored ultra-slim “iPhone 17 Air,” it’s going to be business as usual in terms of thermals.
[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]
